nuit blanche
by ShinigamiForever
Summary: despite the title, actually in english. Slash- Draco/Harry, Ron/Draco. Two cups of coffee shared on a sleepless night.


nuit blanche  
By: ShinigamiForever  
  
Warnings: Slash. A lot of it. Draco/Harry, both sided. Ron/Draco, one sided. Guess who! (it's obvious)  
  
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not mine. Not mine. Get it?  
  
A/N: Do you know I hate Ron/Draco pairings? And yet I am writing one. *sigh*  
  
  
  
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He is sleepless and restless in the night. I am sleeping a few feet apart from him, in the other bed, and listening- simply listening- to the sounds of our separate breathing. Sleepless in the same room, his gentle thrashing in the sheets. I can feel his restlessness from here. Maybe that's why I can't sleep tonight.  
  
Stupid. You can't sleep because he is in the same room. Just as you can't sleep when he is not in the same room.  
  
Make no mistake. I hate him. I hate him like I hate his sandy blond hair. I hate him like I hate his winter white skin. I hate him like I hate his windblown eyes. And I hate him because he is the sum of all these things and more. The hate is embedded in the slow current of my blood, sometimes sweeping up in long arms of undertide to drown out the longing and the want. So there. I hate him. There is no more to say.  
  
Except that he cannot sleep, and I cannot sleep, and I should not care. I don't care. Yes. I don't care.  
  
I usually don't lie to myself.   
  
He gets up. My hearing has become so sensitized towards him that I know his breathing pattern, and I can hear his movements from across the room. He is walking around, pacing is more like it. He is boundless and boundaries fall beneath his feet, of skin and plaster and sheet boundaries. I am still bound to my bed. There is a smell of coffee, roasted beans and rich liquids, brown and full and lively, mocking our sleeplesssness, mocking our futile attempts to sleep. He is brewing coffee, making what little beverage the Muggles offered in those bags.  
  
He is brewing coffee to wipe away the taste of his lover's lips. How I wish I could brew coffee to wipe away the memory of him.  
  
And so I too get up, lifting the covers that are as heavy as layers of lead on my body, molding to my sleepless form. His image is small and indistinct in the pale light shimmering through the curtains. His back, bent over the table to make coffee, and he straightens up, hearing my movement. He is iricandescent and strange and lovingly approachable, even though he is so far away.  
  
"Why are you up?" Why do I sound so accusing? His white eyelids fluttering, pale eyelashes to match, lily white cheeks almost blue in the night.   
  
In French, the phrase nuit blanche means a white night, or a night without sleep. How fitting. A night without the warm forgiving black oblivion of sleep and dreams; instead, a night of sharp and angled white, jerking at the senses, sharp bolts of pallid lightening. He is pale and colorless like a nuit blanche. He is vanilla and cream and cold milk. And yet he holds a cup of coffee as black as sleep, as black as forgetfulness, and he looks at me with nightstained dark gray eyes.   
  
"I can't sleep, Weasley. Is that a crime?"  
  
Is he beautiful because I want him, or do I want him because he is beautiful? What does one do when faced with his brand of amoral exiquisiteness? Perhaps I want to break him, and that is why I long to have him in my arms. To break him like the porcelian doll he is.  
  
"No," I say, wrapping those arms around my body to keep them from moving outwards to him. The small coffee machine is on the table, gurgling away, oblivious to the small silent drama we play out with our eyes. I compare him to the night.  
  
Why does it remind me of Harry?  
  
His bone white fingers wrapped around a styrofoam cup, steam going up towards his face. His lips, painted with unnatural paleness. His skin, full of the lustor of 3 AM. And I, full of the loneliness of too early morning. "Coffee?" he asks, clenching the cup so tight I almost can hear it creak in distress.  
  
"Why not."  
  
He sits down, I sit down, both of us with unseen wrinkles of insomnia around our eyes. His shirt is hanging loosely around his body, exposing fine threaded skin to the waning light. The clocks- electric clocks, I will never get used to them- blink with red lidded eyes. Muggle hotels with the stink of summer must and humid air.   
  
His movements are slow and calculated as he pours me a cup of coffee, after the machine is done brewing. His fingers are trembling, although if it is from strain, I would not know. The slight gossamer of a poet's fingers as he hands me the cup, looking at me in a distant way, separate from this place like our night time breathing. Cold and whisperlike and thinking of someone else. Of Harry.  
  
"Thanks." I take the coffee, and the taste is bitter on my mouth, like his face. Of ashes and burnt wood and burnished salt tears. He doesn't see the grimace on my face. I ignore the ache on his.  
  
"You miss him much?" I ask, feigning carelessness, my own fingers going around the cup, threatening to break the strange material in my hands, threatening to spill the liquid with my trembling. The black liquid like sleep, and yet not a draught for sleep. I can almost hear his eyes turning to stare at me, momentarily jolted from his longing.  
  
"Yeah." I watch him nod slowly, eyes unfocused now at the table, the coffee machine between us. Harry between us, and I reaching for Draco. Except I don't, and instead he says again, "Yeah."  
  
The sudden sound of the cooling system turning on that frightens me. He looks up momentarily, then turns his body around to not face me. Rejection in almost every line of his body. The electric winks of the clock and the musty smell being chased away by recycled air, flowing through my body like the love and the hate and the magic. Like the blood, tied with magic and need and him. Except he doesn't care.  
  
"I'll-" and I stop. He looks at me, finally looks at me, but still can't see me, trapped in a world of him, of green eyes and black hair and a sylphlike touch.  
  
"Hm?" Not really hearing though, windchimes in his ears.  
  
"I'll never forgive you. For- doing that. To him." It makes no sense. What I want to say is impossible to say, I'll never forgive you for not loving me, for not wanting me? It's not his fault any more than it is mine.   
  
He looks away again, lifts the white cup to his china lips and swallows, the Adam's apple bobbing in his thinly carved throat. He puts the cup down, rolling it in his hands, feeling the warmth that will never amount to the warmth of his lover's skin. "It's okay," he says, distracted. "It's really not your fault."  
  
No. It _is_ his fault, because he is beautiful. And because he loves Harry, and not me, and I am damned.  
  
Maybe they wanted so much and were denied so much that the longing became the basis of everything, and the more they wanted the less they got, and the less they got the more they wanted. So it went. Maybe whatever happened between them was so immense that I was nothing more- am nothing more- than a minor glitch and he does not even realize I am here, pining away for him. Or maybe he does, but it is more likely that he does not realize anything, except for Harry. I, with him on my mind, and he, with Harry on his mind, and Harry, with Draco on his mind, and the two cups of coffee and the coffee machine between us.  
  
I finish drinking and put my cup on the table, walk back to bed, pull over the covers, and do not even attempt to fall asleep.  
  
He does not know I cannot sleep, and even if he did, he would not care. I know that he is sleepless and full of insomnia and I should not care nor mind nor know. He has someone on his mind, under his skin, in his veins.   
  
I want to be the one whose touch keeps him awake, whose face is stuck in his subconciousness, whose taste is in his mouth even though he drinks coffee, and whose voice drives him insane when all is silent.  
  
I should not care that I am not that person.  
  
But I do, anyway.  
  
It is a nuit blanche tonight. A white night.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
A/N: Reviews! Please please please! I beg you! 


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